Exclusive: Saturday, January 17

"Is there anything more shameful than the man who lacks the courage to be a coward?" Peter Blaunder

CBS News reported that Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John G. Roberts, Jr., would meet in private with impostor president elect, Barack Hussein Obama aka Barry Soetoro and so forth, on January 14, 2009:

"At the invitation of Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., Mr. Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden will pay a protocol visit to the Supreme Court of the United States Wednesday afternoon, the office says....The visit is private; reporters and photographers will not be present."

I called the media number at the Supreme Court yesterday afternoon. The giddy operator confirmed they expected Obama at any minute! Read article.

Geithner Accepted IMF Reimbursement for Taxes He Didn’t Pay

Byron York, NRO.com

Although it has been dismissed by some observers as a “hiccup” in an otherwise smooth confirmation process, treasury secretary-designate Timothy Geithner’s failure to pay self-employment taxes during the years he worked at the International Monetary Fund is causing some Republicans on Capitol Hill to ask serious questions about his actions. First among those questions is why he accepted payment from the IMF as restitution for taxes that he had not, in fact, paid.

Documents released by the Senate Finance Committee strongly suggest that Geithner knew, or should have known, what he was doing when he did not pay self-employment taxes in 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004. After his failure to pay was discovered, first by the IRS and later during the vetting process, Geithner paid the federal government a total of $42,702 in taxes and interest.

The IMF did not withhold state and federal income taxes or self-employment taxes — Social Security and Medicare — from its employees’ paychecks. But the IMF took great care to explain to those employees, in detail and frequently, what their tax responsibilities were.

First, each employee was given the IMF Employee Tax Manual. Then, employees were given quarterly wage statements for the specific purpose of calculating taxes. Then, they were given year-end wage statements. And then, each IMF employee was required to file what was known as an Annual Tax Allowance Request. Geithner received all those documents. Read article.

Silence of the lamb chops

Jonathan Martin, Politico.com

Call it a charm offensive or a high-level “Listening Tour,” but Barack Obama is already signaling that he intends to break with the current president in one obvious way: hearing from his critics.

Obama Tuesday night trekked to the Chevy Chase, Md., home of conservative columnist George F. Will to talk politics and get to know some of his fiercest intellectual adversaries: Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Larry Kudlow, David Brooks, Rich Lowry, Peggy Noonan, Michael Barone, and Paul Gigot.

The two-and-half-hour dinner, which came at Will’s request, is only the first get-together between the president-elect and Washington’s opinion-makers. Wednesday morning he met with prominent columnists and liberal commentators, including the New York Times’ Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd and the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne. Read article.

Parade of Fools Set to Descend on Washington

Steve Gil, Pajamas Media.com

Obama's inaugural procession will be a carnival of political correctness.

Next week the liberals will troop to Washington en masse to celebrate the inauguration of President Barack Hussein Obama. But not satisfied with having won the election and expanded their power in the House and Senate, the loonier leftist extremists are committed to putting their peculiar brand of nitwittery on parade throughout the inaugural festivities.

It all started with a left-wing hissy fit over Pastor Rick Warren being invited to give a prayer at the inauguration. Now we have the atheist element in the Democratic Party protesting prayers of any sort at the inauguration combined with the “gay, lesbian, transgender, etc.” crowd launching specific denunciations of Warren due to his Biblically-based admonitions against sinful behavior and gay marriage.

Apparently, neither of these groups has figured out that the ongoing policy input that Warren can expect to provide to the Obama administration is akin to the “play calling” input that a pastor giving a pre-game prayer at a football game generally makes after the opening kickoff: none. Read article.

Obama's Conflicting Goals

David Limbaugh, Townhall.com

President-elect Barack Obama's enormous stimulus package would be scary enough without learning the details. To inject the same staggering amount of government-created or borrowed money into the economy as has already been spent or set aside for the government bailout when there's no proof it will jump-start our economy and no thought given to how we're going to recoup this money is madness. But when you hear some of the uses he has for this money, it is way beyond madness.

Let's put aside for a moment our valid objections to the Keynesian idea that the government can create prosperity simply by printing and distributing money as if it were "Monopoly" money. If that were true, the only limit to our sustained prosperity would be the amounts of paper and ink we could produce.

Let's also put aside the enormity of the liberal hypocrisy of railing against deficit spending for the past eight years, as Obama stands blissfully poised to dwarf those records.

Instead, let's just examine Obama's inflexible commitment to two conflicting goals, as evidenced in his interview on "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos. Read article.

Hillary Intervened For Bill’s Donors

Sweetness-Light.com

Secretary of State nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton intervened at least six times in government issues directly affecting companies and others that later contributed to her husband’s foundation, an Associated Press review of her official correspondence found.

The overlap of names on former President Bill Clinton’s foundation donor list and business interests whose issues she championed raise new questions about potential ethics conflicts between her official actions and her husband’s fundraising. The AP obtained three of the senator’s government letters under the Freedom of Information Act…

The letters and donations involve pharmaceutical companies and telecommunications and energy interests…

Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Clinton Foundation both declined to answer questions about whether the senator tried to step away from issues directly affecting donors to her husband’s charity, and whether the foundation tried to screen out money from those on whose issues the senator had intervened… Read article.

The environmental movement's goal is to afflict the economy, not comfort the ecology. Carol Browner, who'll run the new White House office of climate and energy policies, isn't new to Washington. The public will recognize her name from the years she served as Environmental Protection Agency administrator under Bill Clinton.

The public, however, knows little or nothing about her work with Socialist International, a group that describes itself as a worldwide organization of social democratic, socialist and labor parties that envisions a "new, democratic world society" and typically takes anti-U.S. positions.

Within its declaration of principles there are clear signs it's comfortable with using the authority of the state to establish a global socialist regime. Read article

Journalists Being Shut Out by Obama

Warner Todd Huston, NewsBusters.org

According to Sun-Times columnist and long-time Chicago journalist, Carol Marin, journalists at Barack Obama news conferences have come to realize that Obama has pre-picked those journalists whom he will allow to ask him questions at the conference and many of them now "don't even bother raising" their hands to be called upon.

One wonders why journalists are allowing this corralling of the press? Would they have allowed George W. Bush to pre-pick journalists like that? Would they meekly sit by and allow themselves to be systematically ignored, their freedom to ask questions silenced by any Republican? Would journalists so eagerly vie with one another for the favor of Bush like they are Obama's? Read article.

Democrat Proposes Repealing 22nd Amendment on Presidential Term Limit

RightSideOfLife.com

Just in case you thought the entire eligibility issue was a big deal, now we have Rep. Jose Serrano (D-NY) proposing House Joint Resolution 5, "Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to repeal the twenty-second article of amendment, thereby removing the limitation on the number of terms an individual may serve as President."

This bill was introduced into the Judiciary Committee on January 6 (first day of the 111th Congress). Read article.

Will Obama Airlift 100,000 Muslims Into us?

J. Grant Swank, Jr., MosqueWatch.blogspot.com

That’s what John Podesta of Center for American Progress is requesting of B. Hussein Obama.

He wants these Muslims housed in America—in your town, in your city, in your neighborhood?

Podesta says that these Iraqi Muslims have helped US militia there so that the Muslims’ lives are in danger.

The Muslims who were part of the initial thrust for a democracy build via US involvement must remain there in Iraq in order to see through the project.

The United States cannot consume all these people into the American culture. It is impossible for it to work.

What Obama Could Learn From Cheney - He sacrificed his popularity to make the tough calls.

William McGurn, Online WSJ.com

In some interesting ways, the outgoing vice president could prove to be the best friend the incoming president has.

No doubt the thought provokes apoplexy among the Daily Kos types who have already had to stomach the retention of Bob Gates at the Pentagon.

These days, after all, Mr. Cheney is a synonym for torture, a punch line on late-night television, and -- as he himself conceded in a CBS interview the other day -- a new Darth Vader. Mr. Obama's own running mate calls Mr. Cheney "the most dangerous vice president" in American history.

Mr. Obama, however, is no fool. Whatever decisions he will make on hot-button issues from Iraq to Guantanamo, he has no intention of allowing another 9/11 to happen on his watch. And that's where Mr. Cheney comes in. Read article.

The Cats Are out of the Bag

Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com

Americans are surprised to learn that President-elect Obama's choice to be his global warming czar, one Carol Browner, was listed as one of 14 leaders of a socialist group's Commission for a Sustainable World Society, which calls for "global governance" and says rich countries must shrink their economies to address climate change, according to the Washington Times.

The fact that the woman Barack Obama chose to oversee the effort to combat the global warming fantasy appears to be a believer in the socialist doctrine should come as no surprise - I warned that the hidden motivation of whole climate change scam is the creation world socialist order 12 years ago. Nobody listened.

In my 1997 Wednesday on the Web series on the global warming hoax, "The Iceman Cometh," I wrote the following: Read article.

‘The Right Man’ to Protect Us from Terror? At least, that’s what some of Eric Holder’s surprising supporters say.

Andrew C. McCarthy, NRO.com

‘We are profoundly aware of the challenges that the [Justice] Department and the country are facing,” especially “the constant threat posed by Al Qaeda and Islamic extremists.”

So wrote a group of “former federal prosecutors and senior officials of the Department of Justice,” as they accurately described themselves in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee last week. The authors include several friends and cordial acquaintances of mine. They are all Republicans. They are also now top-tier, Washington-based private lawyers, litigating regularly against the same government they once served. Maintaining the respect and admiration of their former department, no matter which party is in power, is obviously imperative. Read article.

44 to reverse 43's executive orders

Ben Smith & Lisa Lerer, Politico.com

President-elect Barack Obama is expected to move swiftly to reverse executive orders regarding torture of terror suspects, the military prison at Guantanamo Bay and other controversial security policies, sources close to his transition said, in dramatic gestures aimed at reversing President Bush’s accumulation of executive power.

Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) said he’s been informed that President Obama will support his proposed legislation to make public some opinions from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which issued some of the Bush Administration's most sweeping claims of executive power. Obama also has promised to limit President Bush's practice of using "signing statements" to amend legislation. "Every day we get indications that they're serious about reversing the abuses of the Constitution," Feingold, a harsh Bush critic, told Politico. Feingold said he thinks Obama is likely to issue executive orders rapidly reversing Bush policies.

"Every day we get indications that they're serious about reversing the abuses of the Constitution," Feingold, a harsh Bush critic, told Politico. Feingold said he thinks Obama is likely to issue executive orders rapidly reversing Bush policies. Read article.

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